The strategic location of the Swahili people along the East African coast has placed them in the way of several newcomers, both local and foreign, who have come to the coast for various economic and political purposes. For this reason the Swahili have had to make adjustments to …
The business and family networks that linked pre-colonial eastern and central Africa to the Swahili coast, the Indian Ocean islands of Zanzibar, and southeastern Arabia are vital to understanding the social and economic history of the region in the nineteenth century. Omani Arab…
This dissertation assembled and interpreted archaeological, ethnographic, and archaeometallurgical data in an effort to reconstruct and understand the contributions of ironworking technology to the development of Swahili city-states between the tenth and sixteenth centuries A.D.…
This dissertation offers an evaluation of the urbanity of a series of Swahili towns on Pemba Island, Tanzania—called ‘stonetowns’ because of the presence of stone-built elite and ritual structures—by searching for and describing countryside settlements spanning the 8 th to 16th …
Cette étude a pour objectif l'examen, l'analyse et la classification des variétés linguistiques parlées en Somalie et groupées autour du vocable «somali». Ce vocable désigne une unité linguistique, une «langue», le somali, parlé principalement en Somalie, et dans les pays limitr…
This study is a comparative analysis of the African female Bildungsroman, or novel of growth and development. The study traces the textual construction of identity in selected texts by male and female authors writing in English and Swahili languages. The selected texts are: Said…
This dissertation examines a new framework for analyzing identity in coastal East Africa. There is attributed to this region a cultural identity known as Swahili. How this is defined has been a subject of much debate over the past few decades. Swahili identity is somewhat of a p…
This dissertation traces the establishment, expansion, and experience of government girls' education in Zanzibar from the late 1920s to the mid 1950s. Using archival and oral research, I explore shifting perspectives on the purpose of educating girls in government schools. The e…
This thesis describes how women in the Swahili Muslim Society of the Coast of Kenya have influenced their communities. The research discusses the influence of women in the areas of politics, economics, religion, education and social strata. The author contends that women have in…
This study focuses on how gender is constructed, expressed, and symbolized in everyday interactions of the Swahili people of the Swahili people of Mombasa, Kenya, through an analysis of their popular music, taarab. Swahili music has often been categorized by scholars as belongin…
This dissertation draws on methods and theories from psychological and linguistic anthropology to examine the social, religious, and linguistic relationships between the high-status Muslim Swahili and the disenfranchized Giriama who live in the town of Malindi on the Kenya coast…
This dissertation first examines the historio-cultural background of Swahili Islam, which is an African expression of Islam. The dissertation then attempts to understand the supernaturalism of Swahili Islam through describing and analyzing the therapeutic cults of jinn possessio…
For over a thousand years the East African coast has been at the crossroads of trade and cultural exchange between the people of Africa and the cities of Islamic Asia and Arabia. During the late Middle Ages commercial activity expanded throughout the western Indian Ocean, linkin…
This thesis is about pregnancy and childbirth beliefs and practices among the Swahili people of Lamu, a predominantly Muslim town located on Lamu Island off the coast of Kenya. My research establishes that Swahili people of Lamu, who are Sunni Muslims, explain pregnancy and chil…
This dissertation is about the architecture of the Swahili peoples living along the eastern coast of Africa. Specifically, it explores the links and relationships between oral . traditions, rituals and the built environment of the Waswahili (sing. Mswahili ) or the 'people of th…
Swahili ethnicity is highly porous and ambiguous, often reckoned more as a space to be entered into (or exited from) than an essence one might have. Nevertheless, because Kenya's Swahili-speaking Muslims comprise the core of a Muslim minority engaged in struggles for greater rec…
This study investigates experiences in the learning of Swahili across two university programs in African studies, one in Dar es Salaam, and the other in Mexico City, with the goal of understanding how emerging social identities intersect with institutional language policies in t…
